Moon Of My Life
by merlinmercury
Summary: In which Derek is secretly the author of a paranormal romance series.


Stiles has accumulated a ton of assorted werewolf-related paraphernalia since Scott was turned into one—wolf-related movies, comics, books of varying factual integrity. Some of it he buys simply because it's kind of fun to read terrible romance stories and reassure himself that, no matter how ridiculous his life gets, at least he doesn't have to deal with Edward Cullen.

God, he hopes he never has to deal with Edward Cullen.

The latest addition to this collection is a novel titled _Once Bitten_, the first in a series called _The Werewolf Diaries_. The cover, predictably, is half consumed by night sky, an oversized full moon hanging in the corner, while beneath it a shirtless man with long, wild hair looks out over a sleeping town from his vantage point on a rocky outcrop in a forest. Along the bottom the pseudonym _Wolfgang Fenris _is printed in a font that adds unnecessary flicky ends to all the letters.

Stiles snorts as he opens to the first page. This should be fun.

It's not fun at all. It's really, really fucking depressing is what it is; Stiles is two hundred pages in and the narrator, a teenage boy named Deckard, has just snapped the neck of the girl he'd been building up as his true love. Stiles sort of expects the girl, Paula, to make some miraculous recovery from her werewolf bite and be turned after all so they can run happily through the woods together forever—but she stays perfectly dead, is buried, lives on only as a huge bucketful of guilt Deckard shoulders from now on.

Whoever Wolfgang Fenris is, his or her book is not at all what Stiles had expected.

Oh, and Stiles is also about ninety-five percent certain that he or she is actually a werewolf. He hasn't come across a single fact that didn't add up perfectly with his own knowledge and experience of werewolves—plus the olfactory imagery is weirdly intense.

Needless to say, he buys the next one too.

The second of the Werewolf Diaries is called _Ashes and Moonlight_. There's a new love interest—a sexy, older woman whose wisdom Deckard seeks to help him cope with the loss of his previous girlfriend. Stiles thinks the woman—Catrina—is a little creepy; she's full-on, commanding, with none of the inexperienced hesitance about her sexuality that the younger Deckard possesses—but Deckard describes her in such fond terms, lays down streams of thought that justify every detail of who she is and what she does. When Catrina hovers over him amongst the sweaty sheets of Deckard's bed, presses her mouth to his skin and pins him down with her piercing eyes, he feels more desirable, more confident in his own worth than he has since Paula's death.

With her last breaths, Paula had confessed to Deckard that she's known what he was, even though he'd tried to conceal it from her—so when Catrina asks about Deckard's suspiciously quick healing, the pack-like dynamics of his large family, the way he can see, hear and smell things that ought to beyond his senses, he confides in her. He feels good about it, too, as she keeps stroking her hand down his cheek like it's nothing unexpected, nothing she can't deal with.

She asks him for a key, so she can sneak in and visit him more often, and he goes to have a copy cut that very afternoon, filled with hopeful anticipation that this time things are going to work out better.

Catrina burns his house down.

On the final page of the book, Deckard falls to his knees and murmurs apologies against the ankles of his older sister, Lara, as they bury their parents and aunts and siblings.

Stiles can't help it if he tears up a little (okay, maybe even a lot) at Deckard's thoughts as he sits by his mother and father's graves. It's too close to home, too _real_, too much.

The local bookstore doesn't have the next novel, so Stiles orders it online and checks the mail religiously until it arrives.

Book three, _Lone Wolves_,begins in New York where Deckard and his sister have run to escape Catrina and the rest of the crazy hunters who follow her. They rent an apartment and keep to themselves; Deckard tries to brew aconite wine and almost poisons himself in the process; Lara babysits for the single mother who lives upstairs and waits tables and serves Starbucks to tired people who look at her face every morning without any sort of recognition. At night they huddle together on the double bed in the sole bedroom. Deckard feels caged in the city, knows Lara does too, but they don't talk about it. After a month of stewing in his misery, Lara hands him a cheque—her savings from the jobs she's been working—and demands that he see a shrink. He doesn't deny her, would have a hard time of it if he wanted to; since his mother passed, Lara is his alpha.

They grow apart, though. The moon and stars are weak against the city lights, and Deckard spends most full moons chained up in the basement of an abandoned building nearby, less because he doubts his control than because he feels he deserves it.

Lara buys him a car out of the life insurance money, a beautiful sleek Chevy, which she borrows sometimes but he leaves untouched in the garage.

The narrative speeds through the space of a few years—years so profoundly miserable that Stiles wonders how on earth these books have such a following, particularly amongst young women. He supposes it must be a similar case to that of _Supernatural_.

One day, Lara tells Deckard she's leaving, going back home. There are whispers of wolf movement in their hometown and the area is her territory, as alpha, to guard.

Stiles looks up to see Derek glaring at him. Not that that's unusual. There's a particular fiery something in his stare at this moment that tells Stiles book plus stakeout is apparently not a happening thing.

"Look, dude, I'm clearly only here for the sake of driving you around, and maybe calling someone if you get hurt. I could pay all the attention in the world to looking and listening out for intruders and still be completely usele—"

"Why are you reading that?" Derek asks.

"It's relevant to werewolfy things," Stiles tries to explain, but it's hard with Derek's eyes drilling holes in his skull. "It's actually really good. And sad—really, really sad. Almost as sad as your life, dude."

Derek snatches the book and tosses it out the car window into the muddy river that the gutter has become thanks to the pouring rain.

Stiles flails in outrage.

"Dude!" he shouts. "You can't do that! It's not your job to monitor my choice of reading material!"

Derek just nods and gives him one of those looks that really make him question why so many of his fantasies involve the man. It's a problem he really needs to work on. He'll catch a glimpse of humanity, some bizarre act of kindness, and forget for longer than he should about how most of the time Derek's erratic and secretive and rough.

He buys a new copy of _Lone Wolves_ and before long he's picking up where he left off. That thought about Deckard and Derek's lives being similarly tragic sticks in his mind a little—if he didn't know better, he'd almost think that some of the plot was based directly upon Derek's life. He dismisses the thought as nonsense, but it does still leave him with the distinct impression that werewolves' lives are not, in many instances, very happy ones. Now that he's made the connection, his imagination also unhelpfully begins to supply Derek's face to fill Deckard's role. On the one hand, it's just like picturing Derek only with tons more emotional depth, which is totally hot—but on the other, it means that Stiles can't escape him even when he's hiding out in book-world. He can no longer think about hugging Deckard, who is Frankenstein's-creature levels of in-need-of-a-hug, without Deckard's cheeks rasping, stubbly, against his own.

Deckard returns home not long after Lara does. She leaves him a curt voicemail saying she's sure there's at least one wolf in the area, the command to join her going unspoken but not unheard. The next day, he climbs into the Chevy for the first time and drives until he's faced with the blackened, hollowed-out shell of what had been the safest, happiest place he'd ever known.

He's too late, _always _too late. He buries what he can find of his sister's body beside the house, wishes he'd just stayed closer to her. Sits inside his broken family's broken house and mourns as his wolf reaches out in desperation for a pack that's completely gone now.

Stiles wonders if this is how Derek felt when he buried Laura. The guilt he felt for digging her back up and pinning it on Derek when he clearly already blamed himself enough swells anew in his chest.

The next morning, Deckard traces the path of what smells like a newly bitten werewolf through the trees near his house. On the ground, he finds a bottle filled with medication. Whoever the new wolf is won't need the pills anymore, but even so it isn't long before Deckard's ears prick up at the sound of two people crashing through the leaves, chattering loudly about needing to find them.

It is thus that Stiles is introduced to what seems to be Deckard's next romantic interest.

Deckard meets Sam, the new wolf, who remains unaware of what he now is; he'll wait until he's a little closer to believing in that particular truth before he approaches Sam with advice. And then there's Sam's companion, Stanley, who immediately captures Deckard's attention. He even recognises him, remembering his family from the fire years ago—and Deckard is surprised to find that he's pleased by the idea of registering in the mind of this boy. Stanley is quite tall, his musculature slim but defined, his hair short and his dark eyes lined with long lashes. The boy is younger than Deckard—it's not mentioned by how much, but it's clearly enough that it bothers him when Deckard finds he's still distracted by the kid's mouth long after he and Sam have gone.

Stiles is surprised by the direction the series is taking, though not _unhappy_ with it. It corresponds far too well with too many of his personal fantasies for that.

Deckard doesn't _do _anything, though—not like he had with Paula, initiating things, and not like he had with Catrina, responding readily to her advances. Deckard's super sense of smell can detect that Stanley finds him attractive (and Stiles can verify the possibility of that from his own, usually humiliating, experience) but Deckard refuses to act on it. Instead, he pushes the younger boy away, stifling the last browbeaten remnants of that naively persistent hope he's always carried inside him, repeating over and over in his mind that it's a bad idea, a terrible idea for a whole host of reasons, as though it'll become true if he says it enough.

Someone always ends up hurt, ends up dead—and whoever it is, it's always fault. Deckard's already lost more people than he can fully comprehend, more pieces of himself along the way than he could spare. Maybe if he keeps his distance the kid will move on to lusting after someone new, someone his own age who isn't a supernatural creature or, at the very least, isn't quite as comprehensive a train wreck than Deckard is.

The complete lack of progress on the Stanley-and-Deckard front is frustrating, and not at all like ordinary romance novels—not that Stiles exactly makes a _habit _of reading romance novels, but he knows enough. Sometimes it hardly even feels like a novel at all, too brutally honest or hesitant or so overly filled with sadness that the characters' relationships begin to languish. _The Werewolf Diaries, _indeed, he thinks; sometimes it really does feel like he's stolen someone's secret journal to read.

It's when Deckard is dying—asking Stanley to amputate his arm before the poisonous wolfsbane reaches his heart—that Stiles stops being able to argue away the similarities, dismiss things as coincidence.

Catrina's been back in town for all of ten minutes and Deckard is already being dragged through death's door, relying on Sam to save him when he knows the kid is more interested in his own sex life than Deckard's _actual _ 's becoming desperate, asking what he _knows _is too much of Stanley, dreading how thickly the other man's fear will choke the room even more than the pain that's to come when the blade bites in. Stanley will do this for him, he knows he will, but he won't want to speak to Deckard ever again and Deckard won't deny him that when he inevitably demands it. He pushes on because, even if Stanley hates him, Deckard can't protect him, or Sam, or anyone, if he's dead.

Stiles gets out his phone and dials.

"Derek," he rushes out, "I think someone's stealing your life and turning it into a young adult book series." He knows how ridiculous it sounds, he does, but he got past that as an excuse for disbelieving conclusions backed up with actual evidence right around the time he realised his best friend was genuinely turning into a creature of the night.

Derek hangs up on him.

Stiles takes his aggressive silence as encouragement and goes right ahead with ordering the next two.

Derek arrives at Stiles' house about ten minutes after the books do—Stiles is just unwrapping _Burning Red _and _The Alpha _when he pushes open the door to his room and is confronted by a brooding (surprise!) Derek Hale perched on the edge of his bed.

Stiles scrambles to derail any and all runaway trains of thought relating to Derek and his bed.

"Wha—" he says, and not much comes out after that but Stiles thinks he's still made his point.

"_Why _are you reading those books?" Derek growls.

It's really not Stiles fault that he's demented and finds the creepy growling kind of hot instead of just plain creepy. He's a teenage boy; these sorts of issues arise.

"Because I feel like it," he retaliates. "Besides, last time I tried to talk to you about them you—oh, yeah, that's right, _you hung up on me._ So if you want me to stop, you can go right ahead and explain to me exactly _why you even care_."

Derek frowns with his entire body. "I just do," he says, and glares.

Stiles has been dealing with this bullshit for years now, so there's no way in hell he's going to let the glaring faze him.

Much.

"Well, unfortunately for you, I don't give a damn what you think of my personal reading habits. Not unless you can give me an _actual reason_. And maybe not even then."

Derek looks like he's carefully considering his next move, and then in a flash he's surging forward and knocking the books out of Stiles' hands, slamming his back up against the wall.

"Déjà vu," Stiles chokes out. "Just like old times, huh buddy?" he tries to give Derek a little pat on the shoulder but his arms are too thoroughly pinned down.

Derek just keeps glaring and ...sniffs? and then he's gone.

So are Stiles' brand new book purchases.

"Rude," Stiles calls out the open window.

It's not like Stiles has an endless supply of funds. The upkeep on his car pretty much empties his pockets, especially now that he's dragged her into a world where mythical creatures are always scratching and denting and smashing her up. Derek seems intent on stealing and/or destroying every _Werewolf Diaries _novel he buys, and—and it's not cool, okay, because he's acting like even more of a bully than usual.

Stiles wonders what it is he's hiding.

He isn't going to let Derek get away with this. He's not sure how exactly he's going to succeed in that, but that doesn't change the fact that he's already in the car and heading over to the Hale house.

When he arrives, Derek is nowhere to be seen.

"Hey asshole," he calls out. "Gimme my stuff back." They're not his finest lines, but god (and everybody) knows he's said worse.

There's no reply, so he wanders up to the front door, finds it unlocked, steps inside.

It's interesting, actually, looking around the house on his own; in the past he's always been here with other people, in distracting, usually dangerous circumstances. Now, he uses these spare moments to look around a little, taking in the charred and broken bits of wood, the eeriness that even bright sunlight takes on as it filters in through foggy, cracked windows.

"I know you know something, Derek," he says, voice as firm as he can make it.

He rounds the corner into the next room and suddenly Peter's there, lounging against the far wall and looking his usual combination of self-satisfied and exasperated with everyone.

He opens his mouth to speak, but before he can begin Peter's holding up a hand to silence him. Stiles stills instinctively, levels him with an incredulous look.

Peter points to the floor.

"What?" Stiles mouths, and he doesn't understand why he's not speaking, but he's suddenly very conscious of how quiet and still his surroundings are.

Peter crouches, beckons for Stiles to come closer and see for himself. It's not that he's comfortable with getting closer, but Stiles reasons that if Peter wants him dead, he's going to end up dead no matter what he does now. As he approaches, Stiles can make out a rectangular shape cut in fine lines into the floorboards. It's like a large trapdoor with no handle and not quite enough space around it to slip fingers in and pull it open. Peter holds up a hand, claws sprouting quickly from the nail beds. Stiles watches as he fits the sharp tips into the thin crack and lifts the wooden slats free.

Stiles has no idea what he's expecting, but it's not this. The space under the floor is about the size of a generous closet, furnished with a small desk and chair, lit by a table lamp—and there in the middle of the little space sits Derek, a pair of chunky headphones clamped over his ears, broad shoulders hunched as he bends over the glowing screen of a laptop. On the floor beside him is a pile of books, some of which look like Stiles' _Werewolf Diaries _volumes, only—

—only there's an _entire collection_ there, complete right up to the most recent publication. Which, if Stiles remembers correctly, is due to hit the shelves _tomorrow._

Derek's headphones must be cancelling out a lot of the noise around him, because it's only as the door above him is being pried open that Derek freezes.

He lifts the headphones off slowly.

"Stiles," he sighs, keeping his eyes fixed on the document open on his computer.

"Uh," says Stiles.

"Well," Peter rubs his hands together and looks over towards the front door, "I'll leave you two to have a chat."

"You knew that someone was writing about us! Have you—have you contacted them? Has there been another wolf spying on us?—or some sort of prophet, like Chuck in _Supernatural_—" Stiles hisses.

Derek finally turns around to face him. He looks defensive, and a little... sheepish? Stiles isn't sure if sheepish is an expression that Derek Hale is actually supposed to have. He nods as thought the simple motion hurts him. Stiles dangles his legs down into Derek's little space under the floor, lets the rest of his body follow them down until his feet hit the floor. It's concrete, a little jarring on his ankles, but he doesn't collapse in a heap which is absolutely a plus.

He picks up the two books on the top of the pile—his stolen copies of books four and five. Further down the pile, Derek has his own. He runs a hand over the smooth, brand new cover of _Dispersion_, which Derek has somehow acquired prior to its official release date.

That's when it hits him. It's fucking absurd—but then that's true of more things in his life these days than not; by now he should know better than to rule anything out, ever. It's still just a theory, until he glances at Derek's laptop screen.

_...I felt Lloyd's heart stopping around my fingertips. I pulled together enough control to retract my claws and pull my hand free of my beta's chest, but the damage was already done._

"Wolfgang Fenris is—he's _you_," Stiles breathes.

"I went to a therapist, soon after the fire—Laura forced me into it. She said that writing things out would help. So I did. She—she thought I was putting some sort of imaginative spin on what had happened. She also told me I should write more, consider getting it published."

Stiles sits beside Derek on the central staircase of the Hale house and listens with fascination as Derek strings together more honest words than he thinks he's ever heard from him in a single sitting.

"So those years in New York, you were—"

"—writing a lot, yes," Derek finishes for him. "It took me a while to get a feel for it." That sheepish expression still lingers on his face, and he keeps looking at Stiles like he might run.

Stiles has no current plans to do anything of the sort.

"It became an addiction, in a way," Derek explains. The words sound newborn; realisations that have never been voiced before. "When I wrote things down, I could control them a tiny bit more. Come to terms with them better. Sometimes just figure out how on earth I was feeling in the first place."

Stiles nods, a little lost for words. It's an incredibly odd reversal that's taken place between them these past few minutes. What does one say, though, after inadvertently reading someone's deepest thoughts, insecurities, traumatic memories? Their freaking _diary_.

Stiles also hasn't forgotten that other, rather important thing he's learned from Derek's books. It makes him feel a giddy mixture of excitement and terror and _hope_—but he isn't sure how to bring it up. Tact isn't exactly his strongest point, and he's certainly never employed a great deal of it in his dealings with Derek. Their usual antagonistic, sarcasm-and-growing routine is the absolute least suitable approach for the present moment, when Derek's been opened wide and, by some miracle, is still here talking to him.

"I have a few suggestions," says Stiles.

Derek raises an eyebrow in puzzlement.

"You know, about the books. I mean, I'm not quite up to date yet—which I don't have to ever be, if you don't want me to—but I don't get the impression that Deckard's perspective on himself is entirely accurate. He doesn't seem to see what a good guy he actually is, even after everything that's happened to him, and I'm just... worried, you know, that the story won't properly move forward until he's reminded of that."

Derek huffs out a breath that sounds like exhaustion with the barest hint of amusement. Stiles will take what reassurance he can get, so he presses on;

"I also think you've underrated the extent to which Stanley cares about Deckard. I mean, Deckard knows the guy's attracted to him, but he's oblivious to the fact that if Deckard ever just _confided _in Stanley, if he could ever trust him, then there's no reason they couldn't... you know, work. Together. Really, surprisingly well, actually."

He trails off, a little nervous now that Derek's not the only one with his cards lying face up on the table anymore. It's only fair, but it's still difficult; Stiles is still working on merging his mental files on Derek and Deckard properly, still working on comprehending the fact that everything he's ever felt for Deckard, every time he's wanted to wrap him up in his arms or tell him not to give up hope, it's been Derek he was wishing he could comfort. Now, finding out he can do just that—that Derek actually kind of wants him to—he doesn't know quite where to start.

He settles for knocking his knee against Derek's, their thighs pressing lightly together.

"Are you sure about that?" Derek asks, and Stiles swears he can hear a trace of hope in his voice. He's overly familiar, now, with every last layer of ash and guilt and dirt that presses down on that last, resilient spark, the veritable ocean of sorrow that's done its best to drown it.

"Yeah," he replies, "I'm positive."


End file.
